You Have 0 Friends

"You Have 0 Friends"

"You Have 0 Friends" is the fourth episode of the fourteenth season of the animated television series South Park, and the 199th episode of the series overall. It aired on Comedy Central in the United States on April 7, 2010. In the episode, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny make Stan a Facebook profile against his will and he becomes embroiled and frustrated with everyone asking him for friend requests. After he gets fed up with Facebook, Stan tries to delete his profile but is sucked into a virtual Facebook world. Meanwhile, Kyle starts trying to find ways to get more friends on Facebook after he drastically starts losing them due to his befriending of a third-grade friendless Facebook user, who everyone thinks is a loser.

The episode was written and directed by co-creator Trey Parker and was rated TV-MA L. "You Have 0 Friends" features several references to Facebook, the 1982 Disney movie Tron, the CNBC series Mad Money, and Chatroulette.

Plot

Kyle, Cartman and Kenny surprise Stan by creating a Facebook account for him. Stan protests, saying he does not want to get "sucked into" Facebook. Cartman warns Stan that if he does not add any friends to his Facebook profile, he will end up like fellow student Kip, a Facebook member who has had his account for six months and has no Facebook friends. Kyle starts to pity Kip and adds him as a friend, much to the joy of Kip.

Stan reluctantly begins using his account after his father's repeated requests to add him as a friend. Meanwhile, Kyle notices that his number of friends on Facebook is drastically decreasing. Cartman begins hosting his own Facebook friend advice podcast entitled Mad Friends, where he claims that others are removing Kyle as a friend because he added Kip as a friend. Stan soon discovers that maintaining his account and engaging in typical Facebook activities are sources of continued annoyances. Eventually having 845,000 friends on his profile, Stan attempts to delete his account. Facebook will not allow him, and Stan is literally sucked into a virtual Facebook world through his webcam. He is brought to a "gaming arena" and is forced to play Yahtzee with another player. Stan wins immediately, and his opponent disappears from the digital world. Stan escapes and retreats to Kyle's Farm Town farm.

Seeing Stan on his computer screen, Kyle tells him that, according to Stan's profile page, he is hosting an online chat party at Café World. Stan encounters the virtual representation of his profile there, and is once again forced to play Yahtzee. Again, Stan wins quickly, and his defeated profile disappears. Stan is then returned to the physical world, where he informs his father that his profile had gone "rogue", and that after defeating it in battle, Stan was able to send his Facebook friends elsewhere. In an effort to keep his Facebook friends from deserting him, Kyle deletes Kip as a friend. Kip sees this on his account and is devastated, until he sees that he has inherited Stan's 845,000 friends.

Production

South Park co-creator Trey Parker wrote "You Have 0 Friends".

"You Have 0 Friends" was written and directed by series co-founder Trey Parker and was rated TV MA-L in the United States. It originally aired in the United States on April 7, 2010. The episode is based on the popularity of the online website, Facebook which had reached 400 million users by the time the episode aired.

Cultural references

Mad Money was parodied in the episode as Mad Friends.

The episode prominently features several aspects of the online website Facebook, including the Facebook games Farm Town, Café World and a digital version of the Milton Bradley game Yahtzee. Also, many aspects of the virtual Facebook world Stan gets sucked into in the episode parody the film Tron. The episode also features the website ChatRoulette, as well as the fact that many men use their webcams to show their genitalia. Cartman's podcast, Mad Friends, is a parody of a segment from the financial show Mad Money on CNBC. The restaurant Casa Bonita, previously referenced in the episode "Casa Bonita", is mentioned by Cartman in his podcast. Kenny connects to the internet with a computer provided through the One Laptop per Child program. On both Stan's and Kyle's Facebook page you can see that their birthdays are October 19 and May 26, they both correspond with Trey and Matt's real birthday respectively. When Stan attempts to delete his profile, it responds "I'm afraid I can't let you do that Stan Marsh," a line Flynn is told by the computer in the movie, Tron, before being sent to the computer world which was in turn a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey

Reception

In its original American broadcast, "You Have 0 Friends" was watched by 3.071 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research making it the second most viewed cable show of the night after In Plain Sight and beating last week's, "Medicinal Fried Chicken". The episode also received a 18-49 rating of 1.7 and a share of 5% edging out Tyler Perry's House of Payne for the cable lead in the demographic.

The episode received generally positive reviews from critics. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly said "The half-hour was shrewdly precise in its targets: The older audience that communes on Facebook (such as parents and grandparents) as well as lonely kids; as usual, "South Park" is merciless when it smells a baby-boomer-adopted trend." Ramsey Isler of IGN gave the episode a 9/10 saying it was "[o]utstanding" and "brilliant from beginning to end, and one of the best episodes the series has served up in a while." Carlos Delgado of iF Magazine gave the episode an A- saying "You have 0 Friends has the right amount of humor, intelligence, and sarcasm to match any South Park episode. The question is, does it become an instant classic?"

TV Fanatic gave the episode 3/5, saying there was "too much Facebook" in the episode and that "it was a great parody, but just a decent episode that could have had more LOL moments." Todd VanDerWerff of the A.V. Club was more critical of the episode, giving it a D+ saying "But, then, what turned me away from South Park a while back was that the vast majority of the episodes just sort of fall into that camp. The show, confident in its legacy as a TV legend, has mostly just started doing bland episodes that say, 'Did you ever notice this?' and then coast from there. It's like the series—which can still pull out a great episode from time to time and still remains enjoyable enough if you don't think about it too much—has abruptly turned into a hack stand-up comic or, worse, a 44-year-old suburban dad who just doesn't understand what his kids are up to but knows he doesn't like it.".

Within 24 hours of airing, Kip Drordy had over 10 fake facebook profiles made, and a fan group with over 30,000 fans.

External links

• Episode guide at Southparkstudios.com
• Episode guide at Southparkstudios.co.uk